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NASA shuttle landing delayed for 2nd day in a row

The offshore storms prompted NASA to skip both morning landing
attempts at Kennedy Space Center. Despite an equally dismal
forecast for Sunday, Mission Control opted to wait out the bad
weather rather than take a detour to California.

A cooling-system problem cropped up aboard Atlantis shortly
after Mission Control informed the astronauts of the latest landing
plans. Commander Scott Altman and his crew were instructed to hold
off on opening the payload bay doors just in case an emergency
return was required. Within minutes, however, the astronauts were
assured that everything appeared to be working normally.

"We're confident that the radiators are working fine for us.
They might have been just a little bit cold," Mission Control
said.

"That sounds good," Altman replied.
Atlantis' seven astronauts made it further into their landing
preparations than they did Friday, when storms directly over the
Florida landing site resulted in much earlier cancellations.

Altman and his crew are trying to wind up their Hubble repair
mission, which began May 11. It was NASA's last visit to the
19-year-old observatory. The $1 billion overhaul should keep the
telescope working for another five to 10 years.

The weather at the backup landing site, Edwards Air Force Base,
is expected to be good all weekend, but it takes time and money -
close to $2 million - to ferry a shuttle cross-country.

As for Florida, forecasters expected more bad weather from the
same low-pressure system that has been drenching Florida for days.
But there was a slight chance that conditions would improve, and
that was enough for NASA to ride it out another day.

Atlantis has enough supplies to remain in orbit until Monday.

As the astronauts settled in for another unwanted day in space,
President Barack Obama announced his choice for NASA's next
administrator, Charles Bolden, a former shuttle commander. Obama
told the Atlantis crew earlier in the week, in a phone call, that
an announcement was imminent. If confirmed by the Senate, Bolden
would become only the second astronaut ever to lead the space
agency.

Atlantis' mission culminated earlier this week with the release
of Hubble, freshly restored and considered at its scientific peak
thanks to the astronauts' effort. In five back-to-back spacewalks,
they gave the observatory new science instruments and fixed two
others, and replaced batteries, gyroscopes and other aging parts.

This was the fifth and final visit to Hubble by astronauts. With
NASA's three remaining space shuttles slated for retirement next
year, there will be no way to stage another repair mission at the
space telescope. It will be steered into the Pacific sometime in
the early 2020s; a docking ring was installed by Atlantis'
astronauts just for that purpose.

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On the Net:
NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission-pages/hubble/main/index.html